Triangle

A satisfying mind-twister, with an unexpectedly poignant pay-off. You’ll see where it’s going quite early on, but it still keeps some shocks back for the final act.

Review

That title could allude to the Bermuda Triangle, but viewers of a certain age might be pining for a feature-length version of the BBC’s legendary 1980s shipboard soap starring Kate O’Mara and Larry Lamb. Actually this is a rather smart, interestingly constructed scary movie from British director Christopher Smith (Creep, Severance) set in the US: a supernatural time-shift chiller perhaps inspired by Donnie Darko. A group of twentysomethings take a jaunt on a fancy yacht, get into difficulties and gratefully scramble aboard a weird 1930s-vintage ocean liner that looms mysteriously up out of the mist. But nobody’s there and as the increasingly terrified castaways walk down the ship’s endless Kubrickian corridors and into eerily deserted art deco rooms, it’s clear that there are some very weird things going on. Somebody from the future is there, trying to kill them, and a time-loop is creating replicants of the people aboard, leading to one absolutely brilliant image of a pile of identical corpses. In the end, it all gets messy – in every sense – and there is a plothole in the form of one member of the group who vanishes when they get aboard the ship. Her disappearance is never satisfactorily explained. Well, no matter. Smith creates some real shivers.